Cherokee City Rediscovered, Clown Prophecy Fulfilled on April Fools’ Day

experiencecadescove.com / The National Park Service joined the April Fools’ Day fun with a press release announcing the “discover” of a 350-year-old underground city in Cades Cove. This image is of the underground city, located beneath the Great Smokey Mountains National Park.

Steve Russell

Apr 3, 2017

April Fools’ Day pranks are rampant, National Park Service joins fun.

Coyote’s favorite holiday is in the rearview mirror and that makes it time to look back on April Fools’ Day and scrub the egg off our faces.

There was a fake press release going around in which President Donald Trump claimed he was not a complete fool and he really did “believe in” science and all that stuff he did to relax any controls on pollution was a big prank. Unfortunately, the claim that science denial was a prank was itself a prank.

Google did their usual release of improbable technology, so it’s now time to break the news that you can’t order a “workout armband” for your Chromebook and the Chromebook will not become a window into virtual reality.

Oh, and Google’s plan to open a data center on Mars was rolled out slightly ahead of schedule. It’s not true that they are scouting locations on the red planet this year. Give that one some time to become fully baked. Another half-baked announcement from Google involved software to translate alien languages. For now, we can’t get beyond Klingon.

T-Mobile did some treading on Google’s improbable tech territory on April Fools’ Day with the T-Mobile ONEsie. They went Google one better in that you can actually buy the thing if you were jonesing for a garment suitable for a 2-year-old in bright magenta. It can be yours for a mere $40. I am not sure if buying the un-equipped onesie puts you in the queue for when the tech magic becomes available.

Continuing with the theme of semi-true April Fools’ Day gags, the language learning website Duolingooffers a course in Emoji. Apparently, Duolingo puts the free Emoji course up for a loss leader to reel you in to more conventional language classes, like Klingon.

Moving to the social sciences, archaeology had a big April Fools’ Day when the National Park Service uncovered the long-lost Cherokee city of Gawetlvdi. NPS does not yet know what they have because they have not consulted with Cherokee elders. According to the prophecies, a yoneg would never walk in Gawetlvdi until the voters of the United States picked a clown to be POTUS. In 2017, the prophecy was fulfilled.